Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Sermon for November 11th - the Story of Ruth

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17
November
11th 2012

Ruth, the Faithful Outsider

Not long after
Marci and I were married we moved to a little town in northeastern
Saskatchewan, where I worked as parish assistant in three little Anglican
congregations – Arborfield, Red Earth, and Shoal Lake, one white community and
two Cree reserves. In the little town in Ontario where I’d been living and
working before we were married, we’d come across a little Gospel Hall with
Sunday evening services, and since I didn’t work Sunday evenings and we liked
to try different things, we went along to their services. We found them to be a
warm and friendly little church and we went back to worship with them several
times. So when we moved to Arborfield, we were pleased to discover that there
was a Gospel Hall there too, and we looked forward to joining them from time to
time.

That’s when we
found out that not all Gospel Halls are the same! We went to a Wednesday
evening prayer meeting that we saw advertised on their notice board, but we
quickly discovered that they weren’t really expecting, or even wanting,
visitors from another church. At the front of their meeting hall the chairs
were set around in a rough square, facing each other, and then the rest of the
chairs at the back of the room were in rows facing the front like an ordinary
church. When we walked in, the regulars were all sitting in the square at the
front; they were astounded to see us, and when we told them who we were, we
were quickly ushered into a seat in one of the rows, outside the square; “You
can sit here”, we were told. We got the message loud and clear: we were
outsiders, and they were suspicious of outsiders. Not surprisingly, we never
went back.

I suspect that if
you were a foreigner, moving to Israel in ancient times was a bit like us going
to that Gospel Hall. Israel saw itself as a distinct society, worshipping the
one true God while all its neighbours worshipped idols. And in the law of
Israel there were strong statements about not marrying outsiders and keeping
pure from their idolatry and sin. But in the story of Ruth we read about
someone who bucked that trend, and, possibly to her surprise, she found a
community that was willing to welcome her.

Historically this
little story is set ‘In the days when the judges ruled’. In other words, we’re
taking about the time after Moses and Joshua led the people out of Egypt and
into the promised land, but before the days when there were kings like Saul and
David to rule over them. The story starts in Bethlehem in Judea, with a man
named Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons Mahlon and Chilion. There
was a famine in the land, so Elimelech took his family to the neighbouring
country of Moab to live. This would be rather adventurous for an Israelite, as
the Moabites were traditional enemies of Israel.

Elimelech died
soon after the family arrived in Moab, but the two sons both married Moabite
women, Orpah and Ruth – another unusual thing for an Israelite family. They
stayed in Moab for about ten years, and then both Mahlon and Chilion also died,
leaving Naomi all alone with her foreign daughters-in-law.

Naomi heard that
the famine was over in Bethelehem, so she decided to go home to her own
country, and her daughters-in-law began to go with her. But she tried to
discourage them from doing so: ‘Go back to your own mothers’ houses’, she said,
‘and may the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt kindly with me.
There’s no point in you coming along with me; even if I were to marry again and
have sons, would you wait ‘til they were grown and marry them?’ This refers to
a custom in ancient Israel; when a man died without children, his brother was
to marry his widow and raise up children, who would then be counted as the dead
man’s children so that his family line would continue. From this we can infer
that both Mahlon and Chilion had died without producing heirs.

Well, Orpah
turned back and returned to her own land, but Ruth would not. ‘Where you go, I
will go’, she said to Naomi. ‘I’ll live where you live, your people will be my
people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and I’ll be buried with
you’. And so Naomi accepted her company, and the two returned to Bethlehem
together.

Of course in
those days, two women living alone without a man to support them would have
been in a vulnerable position. How would they earn a living? There was a
requirement in the law of Moses that at the harvest time farmers should leave
the wheat standing on the edges of their fields so that the poor and needy
could ‘glean’ it. Also workers who accidentally dropped stalks of wheat were
not to pick them up again but leave them for the poor. So Naomi sent her
daughter in law to glean in a nearby field; it happened to belong to a man
named Boaz. When he heard who Ruth was – apparently her reputation of caring
for her mother-in-law had gotten around - he instructed his workers to make it
easy for her by intentionally dropping some wheat behind them, and he also
invited her to eat with his workers when they took their lunch break. So Ruth
did quite well that day, and at Boaz’ invitation she stayed in his fields and
gleaned behind his workers all through harvest time.

We need a little
background in Jewish law to understand what happened next. As we’ve already
seen, there was a lot of concern for the continuation of family lines and
family property. If a man died leaving a widow, the law required that a near
relative should marry the widow, so that the man’s land would not pass outside
the clan or tribe. The nearest relative, the one who had the obligation to
marry the widow, was called in Hebrew the ‘goel’,
which we could translate ‘kinsman-redeemer’; it was his job to ‘redeem’ the
land if it was to be sold to support the widow, and to marry her as well.

It turned out
that Boaz was a very close relative to Naomi’s late husband, and so Naomi’s
next plan was to try to set him up with Ruth. She sent Ruth to the place where
Boaz and his workers were winnowing barley at their threshing floor. ‘He’s
going to sleep there tonight’, she said; ‘When he’s fallen asleep, lie down at
his feet, and when he wakes, he’ll know what to do”.

Sure enough, Boaz
woke up during the night and saw Ruth lying there. When he asked what she
wanted, she replied, ‘Spread your cloak over your servant, because you are the goel’. Boaz was very pleased; apparently
he was an older man, and she was a younger woman, and he was flattered that she
had gone to him rather than someone younger. ‘I’ll do what you ask’, he said,
‘but we’ve got to do this right. It’s true that I’m a close relative, but there
is someone who’s closer still, and he actually has the right to redeem your
father-in-law’s land. If he’ll do it, fair enough; if not, I will’.

So Ruth stayed
the rest of the night, and in the morning Boaz gave her a sack of barley to
take home for her and her mother. Then he went into town and took his seat at
the gate, which was where business deals and legal matters were transacted in
those days. Pretty soon the other man, the closer relative of whom Boaz had
spoken, came by, and Boaz invited him to sit down. He then asked for ten elders
of the town to sit there as witnesses, and they did so.

Boaz then said to
the other man: ‘Our relative Naomi is going to sell the land that belonged to
her late husband Elimelech. You’re the goel;
you’ve got the right to redeem it. I need to know if you’re going to do so,
because if not, I’m the next in line’. The man replied, ‘I’ll redeem it’. Boaz
said, ‘The day you buy the field you also acquire the hand of Naomi’s
daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, to continue the dead man’s name on his
inheritance’. The other man replied, ‘Then I don’t want to do it, because I
don’t want to damage my own inheritance’. So Boaz said to the people sitting
around, ‘You are witnesses that I’ve acquired Elimelech’s land, and also the
hand of his daughter-in-law Ruth’, and they agreed, ‘We’re witnesses’.

So Boaz married
Ruth, and they had a son who they called Obed. What follows is remarkable: Obed
became the father of Jesse, and Jesse became the father of David, the shepherd
boy who became the great king of Israel. So David’s great-grandma was a foreigner,
a Moabite woman, an outsider. And not only that, but Jesus was a descendant of
David, so Ruth took her place in the family tree of the Messiah.

On one level this
becomes a lovely romantic story, a strong contrast to all the savagery and
killing going on in the book of Judges which is set in the same time period in
Israel’s history. In fact, in the 1950s a Holywood movie was made of this
story, bringing out the romantic elements to the full! But on another level
there’s a lot going on theologically in this story.

In the Old
Testament we see a discussion going on about what it means to be God’s faithful
people. The Israelites saw idolatry as the basic sin. If you worship something
that is not in fact God, then you’ve taken the one true God and replaced him
with a lie. And worshipping a lie, you then come to believe all sorts of other
lies about the sort of life you ought to live. That’s why the Ten Commandments
lay such strong emphasis on not worshipping false gods. ‘You shall have no
other gods before me’. ‘You shall not make for yourself a graven image’.

Most of the Old
Testament authors believed that, if you want to keep yourself free from
idolatry, the best thing to do is to avoid idolaters. So keep strict boundaries
for the people of Israel; don’t allow foreigners in, don’t trust them, and
certainly don’t intermarry with them. We see this line taken in two books that
were probably written at about the same time as Ruth – Ezra and Nehemiah. In
those books, Israelites who have married outside of the ethnic boundaries of
Israel have committed a grave sin; they’ve brought Israel into the danger of being
tempted toward idolatry again. Ezra and Nehemiah and people like them could
point to all sorts of evidence, too: ‘Don’t you remember the story of King
Solomon? He started out good, but then he married a bunch of foreign women who
worshipped false gods, and the next thing you know, he was worshipping their
gods too!’

As I say, this
disapproving stance toward outsiders is the dominant view in the Old Testament.
But it’s not the only view. There’s another strand with a more positive
attitude toward foreigners, and the story of Ruth is part of this strand. Here
we don’t see any disapproval of Ruth’s status as a foreigner. No one accuses
her of being an idol-worshipper who was trying to lead Israel astray. In fact,
we’re told explicitly at the beginning of the story that she says to her
mother-in-law Naomi, ‘Your people will be my people, and your God will be my
God’. In other words, this foreigner, who had been raised to worship the
Moabite gods, decided to become a worshipper of Yahweh, the God of Israel – and
no one questioned that this was a perfectly right and proper thing for her to
do.

But she needed
someone to bring her into the family, and in the ancient world the only way
this could happen would be if someone in the family married her. A woman couldn’t
just up and change her religion without consulting her husband! And so Boaz
acted as her goel, her
kinsman-redeemer, marrying her and bringing her into the family of God’s people
– and into a very privileged place in the family history, as the great-grandmother
of Israel’s greatest king.

In New Testament
terms, we Canadian Christians are like Ruth. In the Old Testament we would have
been seen as outsiders, ‘strangers to the covenants of promise’, as Paul puts
it. The Jews were in, but we were not. But we have a redeemer, a goel, who has brought us into the
family. In the Bible the relationship between Jesus and his Church is often
seen as a betrothal or a marriage: the Church is ‘the Bride of Christ’. He has
extended the borders of the family of God’s people, and now we’re inside.

But you can get
too comfortable inside, and forget what it’s like for people who are still on
the outside. That’s not a good place to be for followers of the redeemer Jesus,
who was constantly on the lookout for outsiders who he could bring in. And like
ancient Israel, we have a choice about this. We live in a culture that is
becoming less and less friendly to organized religion. Our society used to be
thought of as Christian, but now it definitely isn’t. So what are we going to
do? Are we going to circle the wagons, concentrate on our own little religious
club, and assume that everyone out there has no interest in God and Christ at
all? Or are we going to go out confidently into a world that belongs to God,
whether it acknowledges the fact or not, with the message that Jesus gave us:
that everyone who is carrying a heavy
load is invited to come to him and find rest, that all people are invited to become his disciples?

This, of course,
is a very important thing for us to keep in mind on Remembrance Day. One of the
insidious things about war is that it divides the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ –
‘us’, who are on the inside, the good people, and ‘them’, the outsiders, the
evil people. So the foreigner, the person who is different, becomes an object
of fear, and we circle the wagons to keep them out. We might even demonise
them, see them as somehow less than human, to make it easier for us to kill
them. The tragic story of the twentieth century, with the bloodiest wars ever
fought in human history, should have given us an object lesson into where that
attitude leads.

The story of Ruth
tells us that, to God, there are no outsiders – there are only people made in
the image of God, loved by God, people who God wants to draw into the community
called by his name. But we need to remember one thing – and I’m going to leave
you with this thought. Would Ruth have come into the family of Israel without
Naomi and Boaz to bring her in? I suspect not. No matter how interested she was
in the God of Israel, the boundaries would have been just too great. And
outside the borders of organized religion there are many people like Ruth –
people of good will, people who are wanting to know God, people who are curious
about Jesus. I suspect that you know some of those people; I know for sure that
I know some of them. Are you going to
be Naomi, or Boaz, for them – the one who will invite them to come in, the one
who will introduce them to Jesus their redeemer?